"Poor farmers farm poorly," Mike Mack, CEO of biotechnology company Syngenta, told HuffPost Live this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"Most of the farmers in the world, hundreds of millions of them, are smallholder growers, typically women, and they work desperately hard on their farms and they don't make very much money," he said. "Most of the world's poor are farmers, ironically," he added. Mack argued that people in cities need to understand this and the importance of raising up farmers' prosperity.

He also suggested that most farming around the world differs from the vision of large-scale farming that is common in the U.S. "The vast majority of farming is even a poorer version of … the American ideal about agriculture," he said. "It is very poor families typically ... an acre, and they do it by hand."

01/25/2014 8:49 AM EST

Brad Smith On Unplugging

Smith said he unplugs by getting outside and learning new things by doing things like reading.

"To me, that's a real joy," Smith said.

01/25/2014 8:45 AM EST

Relationship Between Business And Government

Smith said the relationship between business and government has a few different dimensions that usually exist at the same time.

"The government defines the laws and we comply with them," Smith said. "There may be times we think the government goes too far and we challenge them... there are times when we work together. There are times when the government is our customer."